Transition to School Policy

Rationale:  Staff will endeavour to provide the skills children will need to help

with the transition to school, to make it a confident and special experience.

Policy and Procedure:  Using the Te Whaariki Curriculum for children

moving from Bright Beginnings to the early years of

school, they are likely to:

• Have established many self care skills.  Minimum supervision for meals and snacks.  Have some understanding of keeping themselves safe and be able to articulate some questions and concerns.
• Have some knowledge about the wider community and environment including knowledge of local schools.  Be confident making some new friends as well as working and playing with children they know.  Understand basic concepts about rules, rights and fairness and the necessity for such rules.
• Feel positive and respect differences in their peers.  Be confident about their interests, strengths, knowledge, abilities and experiences.  Be familiar with working co-operatively  express their own needs and feelings and recognise some needs of others.  Be able to finish tasks as well as understanding that activities can be revisited.
• Have a wide range of language skills.  Enjoy favourite books and be ready to consolidate concepts about print such as direction, how words are made up and the correspondence between written and spoken words.   Have some practical concepts about numbers, counting numerical symbols and applications of numbers, and have used mathematical understandings for every-day purposes, such as sorting, labelling, perceiving patterns, and establishing “fair shares”.  Have developed some techniques for expressing themselves in music, art, crafts and design.
• Have experiences in making choices and decisions, setting their own goals, and using their initiative and have some skills in using a range of equipment safely.  Be able to use discovery, invention, innovation, imagination, experimentation and exploration as means of learning.  Have developed some initial strategies of active exploration in the wider context of the biological, physical and technological world.  Have experienced opportunities to express ideas, ask questions about things of interest and seek out resources eg: books, adults, media, television and the internet.

Whhere Possible Staff Will:

• Offer assistance to parents who are unable to take their children for school visits.
• Have consistent links with new entrant teachers in the local schools with regards to the above ‘procedure’.
• Visit local schools with the children.
• Make social links with local schools in order to allow children to become familiar with the school environment.